Shifting Gears
by seriousish
Summary: Okay, I didn't hate AoU like a lot of people and I'm not an ardent shipper of Clintasha, but I thought it'd be fun to experiment with a Clintasha/Bruce&Betty rewrite of AoU, just as a writing exercise, sticking largely with the established storyline.
1. The Party

The glass surface of the bar was hard and cold under Clint's back, chilling him through both shirt and jacket, a little rubbing chill that didn't quite reach the muscles of his side where he'd taken a repulsor ray (or whatever the hell it was; one of the geeks would probably get on his case if he called it a laser). His arms were folded neatly into a tent of fingers over his belly; he could feel one forearm folded against his side, and _part_ of the other. In the gap where he should've felt his wrist, there was almost a tingling sensation. He wanted to compare it to when his foot fell asleep, but this was that turned inside-out. Maybe if Maya Angelou had taken the laser ( _don't call it that out loud or they'll give you the Steve treatment_ ), she could've called it.

Natasha was behind the bar, doing a stern-faced impression of an Old West saloon keeper, polishing her glass pitcher. Her being unbelievably glamorous, well-heeled, fashionable, gorgeous, and so on made it a somewhat poor impression. She reached out with the thoroughly cleaned pitcher, dinging his head with the bottom of it.

"Our companionable silence is drifting toward awkwardness," she told him. "I do believe Avengers bylaws states here's where you banter with me."

"Don't you have enough boys to pull your pigtails?" he shot back, not unkindly.

Her return fire was a smile. "Nothing like your first, though."

"Alright. Just remember, you offered the penny for your thoughts."

"I offered no such thing-capitalist swine." Natasha fetched a glass from behind the bar, began preparing a melting pot of mixers to dilute the triple-X vodka that would supposedly be the base of her cocktail. The investigation of Natasha using her SHIELD security clearance to smuggle said vodka into the country, in defiance of all known governances of alcoholic proofs, had been ended by Fury himself.

Clint inclined his head away as she poured it. The bottle's glass looked thick enough to be radiation shielding. "Okay—I've been wondering—if I had died back there, would you've cried bitter tears? Even just one, solitary bitter tear?"

" _Da,"_ Natasha replied crisply. "The bitterest."

"While clutching me to your chest and screaming to the skies?"

"Screaming what, exactly?" she asked, very coyly for someone holding a liquid thermonuclear bomb.

"Oh, you know—something about the unfairness of it all… a good man taken so young from this cruel world…"

"Young?"

"Young at heart."

"Oh." Natasha nodded as if she got it. "Star Wars toys?"

"I don't _have any,_ I just thought it was cool that Tony—"

Natasha tossed back her drink. Somehow resisted spontaneous human combustion.

"That Tony had a complete set. Even the Boba Fett with the rocket that can choke you if you fire it down your throat, some kid died…"

"American kids. Pah."

"I know, I know. In Soviet Russia, kids have to wait in line nine weeks to choke to death…"

"Also, line waits on you."

"Mmm." Clint nodded seriously. "Say, forgive me for not noticing while I was looking for a chunk of my midsection, but how'd the new girl do?"

Natasha glanced over unerringly to where Betty Ross had found herself, Clint following her gaze to discover she'd cornered Thor and was grilling him for answers to how apparently normal flesh could sustain your average Chitauri gangbang without a whiff of Gamma radiation. The word 'nanotech' drifted out of the conversation.

"Well, her guy didn't go and get himself brainwashed by Loki—just needed to be put to bed."

"Oh, that's the way it is?"

Natasha passed him a threatening shot of vodka. "That's the way it is."

"That was a one-time deal. I've rescued you plenty of times. More times."

"Conversations like these are why we don't keep track of that sort of thing. Because if we did, I'd be ahead by two."

"One, maybe."

"Shutting the portal to Chitauri-land? Saving the Earth? You live on the Earth."

Clint paused. "Steve told you to do that."

"You want to be wearing the next shot instead of drinking it?"

"Is that an option?" Clint regarded the shotglass in his hand dubiously. "Or would it eat through my flesh like the blood in an Alien movie?"

"Drink. Big малыш."

Clint knocked it back. He was no social drinker, but he was pretty sure Nat's vodka hurt worse than HYDRA misplacing one of his ribs for him. "Okay… okay… this is why I'm lying down…"

"Lightweight. And I helped stop Project Insight. Three times I've saved you."

"That's if HYDRA would've targeted me. I'm a pretty easy guy to get along with. They wouldn't necessarily—"

"Clint," Natasha said warningly.

"Okay. But I helped Thor with the Dark Elves."

"You did not!"

"Can you prove that?"

Natasha looked back up to Betsy. Bruce had joined her and Thor, was trying to translate some of Thor's so-advanced-it-was-old-timey speech into formulas and equations. Betsy had her elbow up, leaning on Bruce's shoulder as she listened to how Thor's hammer was a fixed quantum point—or something. "She really loves him."

"Kinda think that ship has sailed. Didn't SHIELD's files say she'd shacked up with some guy who looks like he lives in a sitcom?"

"SHIELD files." Natasha tsked. "You don't drop everything to become a walking tranquilizer, even for the Avengers. Not unless you really care about the guy. And the Hulk wouldn't listen to her about it being bedtime if it didn't go both ways."

"C'mon," Clint insisted. "She had that whole thing about—working with Tony and Jane and Cho, all the top minds, being at the forefront of building the next Delorean or whatever these eggheads get up to…"

"Excuses, excuses. It's biology. A couple years ago, he was on the run, she was engaged to another man. Now they live next door to each other in the penthouse suite of a private skyscraper. Sometimes, things just end up getting out of the way."

"Maybe they shouldn't." Clint looked up until he found Natasha's eyes. They were distant planets—pale green moons in a dark sky. "C'mon, Nat—everything that got between those two still goes. She could still get hurt—"

"Some things are worth getting hurt for."

Clint was thinking about the shotglass in his hand: the empty glass cold in an alive sort of a way, a reptile sort of way, while he could still feel the liquor burning at the back of his throat. He was thinking about it—a momentary little diversion of a thought—while Natasha's hand was in his hair. Then, as she kissed him, he was thinking of nothing at all.

She withdrew then. Had pickpocketed his shotglass, wiped it down like the sheriff or the blacksmith was going to need it.

"What was that for?" Clint asked.

"No one was watching." She nodded to the living room set-up. The assembling was avenged, or something like that. Tony wanted to make a toast. "C'mon. Let's go see if we can lift Mjolnir."

Only woman he knew who could pronounce that like other people said C-A-T. "Thought you already tried that."

"They don't know that."

Woozily, Clint pushed himself up to a sitting position, so the bar was cooling his butt instead of his back. Already, the kiss felt like a fever dream, but was too vivid, too raw to be any sort of daydream. They'd kissed before—done more than that—but always on the job, part of the con. This had been different. There'd been something unrestrained in Natasha that was never unrestrained.

"And since when do you give away operational intelligence, Agent Romanov?" he asked her in that good clipped voice all the upper-echelon SHIELD guys got.

"When it's an open secret." She licked her lips. The trip her tongue took was quick, but eventful. "I wanna see if you can lift it."

Clint bit back a quip about getting it up—spend too much time with Tony—and slid off the bar to join her, surprising himself by being able to walk without assistant, surprised in general by how Natasha had her arm out in offering. She rotated it, cracking her shoulder, like that was all she'd meant to be doing.

He didn't lift Mjolnir, but after his abject failure, Natasha patted him on the back, circled her hand between his shoulder blades. It felt like being a kid again, that mean old barn cat deciding it wanted to be petted, butting its head against his leg, getting some scritches in, then flopping over to have him pet its belly just so it could dig into his hand with teeth and all its claws.

Natasha, he thought, wouldn't bare her stomach in the first place. Not unless she really wanted to bite you.


	2. The Ship

Clint wasn't too proud of it, but he was kinda regretting jabbing the witch-lady with an electric arrow. Seeing the number she'd done on Nat, he was more wishing he'd just gone with a traditional broadhead. Right through the cortex, just like punching Ctrl-Alt-Delete. His side was still tingling, he had just a bit of a hangover from that vodka that Natasha possibly brewed herself in the fine tradition of Breaking Bad, and two very annoying Millennials had knocked him and his around a drydocked ship.

He was very over AI, as a _thing._

"Nat, you wanna snap out of it?" he asked, shoving her along. Her feet didn't want to work, but stubbornly did so when he was firm enough with her. Otherwise, the lights were on but nobody was home. Same story with Cap and Thor. Thor, at least, could veg out all he wanted; let someone drop MOAB on him, he'd think he just had a bad dream. But if someone went after Steve…

Stairs. Natasha's lips were moving wordlessly as she had a protracted debate with them about something no doubt very traumatic that Clint just _could not_ sympathize with at the moment. He picked her up, hurried her up the steps—God, she was just not heavy, even with all the tech and body armor, he'd moved furniture that'd weighted more—set her back down. Now he had a good line of sight on Captain America, who was dancing with himself. It would've made a good Vine if it weren't sorta terrifying that the strongest man Clint knew was having a bad trip.

Clint nocked an arrow—high-explosive, hairtrigger—just in case the whitehead came back. Let him dodge it; they'd see if he could dodge organ-pulverizing shockwave.

"You'll break them," Nat muttered. "You'll break them…"

In Clint's ear, more pressing matters. "Okay, Cap, you're not asking for a sit-rep—getting one anyway." Tony's voice, thin and strained. "Blew up another Ultron, _you're welcome,_ but he sicced the walking Hot Topic on Bruce. Big Green's headed for Johannesburg and Betty's _not_ in the Quinjet."

"You don't have her LoJacked?"

" _Clint,_ good, I thought this damn radio was busted after I went to all the trouble of inventing it, who've we got?"

"Steve and Thor are out. So's Nat."

A quick, eternal silence. "Dead?"

"No, just—out of it. The Maximoff girl."

" _Shit._ I need a lullaby, and I can't fetch Hulk's gal pal and keep the Johannesburg property valve up _at the same time."_

"You have Bets LoJacked or not?"

"Course I do. Nothing too invasive, but that self-defense armor set I gave her is coded to my satellites—problem is, they say she's in _Swaziland…"_

Fast and Furious. Had to be. "I'll take the Quinjet out, go get her, _you_ handle Hulk."

"You sure you don't want to switch? Hulk has a lot less arrows than you. I know who'd my money would be on."

It'd been very astute of Tony to make his communicators with an off-switch. In the new silence, Clint checked Natasha again. She could disassociate from some pretty hairy stuff—focus on a problem while under fire, ignore an artillery shelling to break a code. If there wasn't anything she could do about a situation, she just removed it from the equation to work on the variables she could solve. But with that turned up to eleven, she'd disappeared into her own head.

Cognitive re-calibration. He slapped her. She didn't even notice it. Fuck it—if she were in her right mind, she'd be calling him a pussy for hesitating. He slugged her.

Natasha came awake, taking in him, her new surroundings, the blood trickling from her lip. "Don't do that. I could kill you without thinking about it." She wasn't bragging.

"Think you're up to making sure no one gets Cap? And Thor doesn't step on anyone?"

"Yeah, sure." She smiled and the shakiness was all in her eyes. "I'll just rely on force of habit."

"I'll be right back."

"Oh, keep a girl waiting, Barton. It just makes us think about you more."

She was flirting. That had to be something of a good sign.

He made for the Quinjet.

* * *

People thought he was a good soldier. Give him a simple task, let him swing the hammer, hit the nail, and he wouldn't have to _think_ so long as he was _focused._ It wasn't like that at all. He was more like Nat. He could focus on a _problem,_ watch a _situation,_ but a _job?_ Something as simple as flying the goddamn plane to the goddamn girl so they could get Bruce calmed down?

That was too easy. It didn't demand any attention. If he were behind a sniper's scope he'd be assessing the situation, checking the dynamics, playing the world. Need to distract _him:_ shoot _her,_ they keep looking at each other. Make sure _he_ takes a bullet, he yells at his underlings. Don't shoot him, his wife just had a baby—not unless you have to.

No variables here. Just do or die. Fly the plane or don't. So that focus went elsewhere. Not back to Loki, no, he was past that. Back to Natasha.

She was a loner, like him. They'd had a system of being alone together, the only ones who could put up with each other, live in the silence too content to try to improve it with _words._ Coulson, Hill, they were okay, but they were button-pushers. They talked. World needed talkers, just not Clint's world. Where they sent him, everything was deeds.

And Natasha'd been the same way. Joined SHIELD for about the same reasons. Three square meals, getting to sleep at night without hating yourself, maybe see someone you'd saved when you closed your eyes instead of the other kind. And they'd clicked. No demands, no conditions, just a _them-ness_ so quiet even the two of them had been able to live with it.

Then Loki. She'd come for him through gods and monsters. Not written him off, but convinced herself there was something worth salvaging. The same call he'd made on her, and she'd called him an idiot then.

He'd joked about how she would feel, being without him. Didn't seem so funny now when he thought about it being the other way around. Maybe they were both loners. Not partners, not even a team, only drawing assignments together because Fury knew a good thing when he saw it. But that was easy enough to explain.

He was a lone wolf, sure. But she wasn't part of the pack, she was part of _him_.

Shit.


	3. The Farm

Clint tried to pay attention to the instruments on the Quinjet—not easy when Stark's design practically flew itself—he kept glancing over his shoulder at Bruce.

The doc still hadn't dressed, sprawled out on the floor in his tattered pants, legs carelessly crossing the floor like a discarded toy but arms pulled taut, clutching an emergency blanket around his bare torso. The smut and grim he'd accumulated as the Hulk hadn't shrunk with his body, piling up on his smaller chest like he was caked in dry mud.

Betty tried to look him over, check that he was okay—or at least get some assurance that he was less _not okay_ than he looked—but Bruce was totally nonresponsive. Whenever she got close, he just pulled the blanket tighter, and Betty cared for him too much to risk upsetting him any further. She just kept cooing softly, nonsense words like "It'll all be okay" and "It's not your fault, Bruce."

Natasha was seated next to Clint. Maybe some people thought she was recovered enough to be up there. He knew she just didn't want them to see her bleed.

Did she not mind him seeing, or not care because he'd already seen it?

"Want me to take over?" she asked, as Clint turned his attention back to the controls.

"No, I got it." He felt Natasha's focus, like a laser, travel to Bruce. "She should leave him alone."

"Is that what he needs or what you did?"

Clint glanced over to Natasha; her plaintive look. This was her way of distracting herself from… everything.

"I remember what it was like." Clint had to drag the words out, but once they were out, they were out. Natasha had a way of looking at him that caught his words, turned one into ten, ten into a hundred. "You don't want people to talk to you. You don't want people to leave you alone. You just want them to say something, but you don't know what…"

"Maybe Betty does."

Clint shook his head. "There's nothing to say. There were people back there. Not even HYDRA. Just people. Citizens."

"He'll get over it," Natasha insisted. "I did."

She wasn't as _distracted_ as she pretended. If he could tell, it had to be bad. "Not everyone's as strong as you, Nat."

"I wouldn't have let him on the team if he weren't close," she quipped.

Clint had to smile at that. "Still topping from the bottom?"

"Never heard any complaints."

"Guess you wouldn't do it with someone liable to complain."

"Yeah." Her eyes slid away from his. "Maybe I should." She was checking the read-out before he could think of a response. If they ever _did_ go that way, Clint guessed they wouldn't need a safe word. He could read her well enough to know when the conversation was over. "Where're we headed?"

"Safe house. The last place they'll look for us."

"You don't mean…"

Clint gave her a surly look. "You kinda leaked all our other hiding places onto the Internet."

"And now you've made me realize that was a mistake. Thank you for ruining my perfection."

"Eh. Anytime." They were closing in. Clint cut their speed. "He's gotten a lot better over the years. Really."

* * *

"Little brother! I can't believe it! You finally bring the team over to visit and you still haven't gotten any more babes! Not that you're not great," he said quickly to Natasha, "but c'mon! Who does she even shower with in the locker room?"

Betty was still on the plane with Bruce, trying to bring him down, while Thor, Steve, and Tony took in the messy farmhouse Clint had brought them to. It was a sturdy home, but fallen into disrepair, with decorations of Early Delivery Food. Their host, Barney Barton, was a somewhat more grizzled version of Clint—taller, with a hipster-long beard and gray in his hair, his once formidable six-pack and biceps now gone to seed and flab. He wore an I H8 Hawkeye T-shirt.

"Guys," Clint said tersely, nodding to Barney. "My brother. Barney. Barney, Avengers."

"You may better know me as Trickshot, Clint's arch-nemesis."

"He's not my arch-nemesis."

"We've had many great battles over the years—"

"We have not!"

An archery target was painted on the wall of the living room they stood on, about where a TV would go as implied by the well-stained couch and easy chairs. Numerous pockmarks from arrowheads, as well as a few embedded arrows, gaze it the uneasy appearance of bad modern art. Tony flicked the fletching of one of the arrows.

"So, Clint… he your mentor?"

"No," Clint said at the same time Barney said "Yes."

"No," Natasha said firmly, a moment later. That settled it.

Tony took his finger away from the arrow, realizing how greasy it was. Not willing to guess at the _why._ "Because I kinda expected you were gonna take us to some retired badass mentor of yours who taught you everything you knew before he ended up in a wheelchair or something. Or an old flame who still owes you a favor and threatens you with a shotgun for cheating on her. Something."

"Could've been one of Natasha's safe houses," Steve suggested, looking around the place, finding it weird even for the 21st century.

"Nah, I kinda have this theory that Natasha's killed everyone who knew her before the age of twenty. That's why she and Clint are such a good team: he handles basic human socialization, she's actually competent."

"My robot plays Nintendo," Clint replied. "Your robot's killing the planet. I win."

"R.O.B. The Robot!" Barney cried. "I still have him around here somewhere!"

"I'm leaving," Thor said suddenly. "I have to go investigate my visions."

"You sure?" Barney asked. "I could make some ravioli first, it's canned."

"No. I must go. It's important. And urgent. Urgently important."

Mustering all his dignity, Thor turned on his heel, cape sprawling behind him, walked back out the way he'd come, and gave Mjolnir a quick twist to carry him up into the air.

"Son of a gun," Steve said. He unlimbered his shield from his back, setting it against the wall beside Barney's bow and quiver—foolishly assuming that this was some kind of weapon storage area and not a random segment of wall.

"Okay, in light of any of us learning how to fly," Tony said, "and I am working on that—what's with Clint having an evil brother?"

"He's not evil," Clint said.

"I'm mad evil."

"He's _not._ He heard about me being an Avenger, so he came up with some dumb social media thing about being a supervillain and now he's got a Kickstarter for his vendetta against me."

"It's radical," Barney said, reaching into one of the many pockets on his cargo shorts. "Here, I have business cards, it's totally legit."

"He's harmless," Clint insisted. "He made twenty thousand dollars on his Frank Stalloneness, built a knock-off trick arrow, and blew up an old Pinto with it. It's on Youtube."

"Twenty thousand dollars to blow up a lemon?" Tony asked. "And I thought I was a genius."

"My next funding goal is a boxing glove arrow," Barney bragged. "I'm going to knock Clint out with it, instead of killing him, put him in a death-trap…"

"None of those things are going to happen," Clint said.

While all this had been going on, Natasha had perched herself on the kitchen island, enjoying herself like a cat watching a laser dot. When Bruce came in, tugging a bulky tee-shirt into place on his weakened frame with Betty's hand supporting him at the small of his back, he looked to her.

"What's with the lumberjack?"

Natasha smiled at him reassuringly. It was just as she'd told Clint—Bruce just needed a little time to himself and he'd get straight. "Clint's fake supervillain brother. It's an internet thing."

"Oh," Bruce said. "Wonderful. Does he shoot arrows too?"

"Yes," Steve said.

"It's weird," Tony said.

"Anyway," Barney said, "mi casa es su casa…"

"I own the place," Clint said. "Used to be our dad's. I let him live here rent-free."

"I think you'll find I have squatters' rights. Anyway, you guys can stay here as long as you want. Just, do something about the killer robot on the news, right?"

Clint looked pointedly at Tony.

"Yeah, that can wait," Tony said. "How come I don't know Clint's fake supervillain brother is a fake supervillain? That seems like the kind of thing I bought Google to know about."

"I promised I'd keep it a secret from everyone," Natasha said. "You know how you boys get."

"You're damn right," Steve said, with a pointed look at Tony.

Tony put a hand to his arc reactor scar, mock-offended. Or maybe actually offended. His sarcasm was hard to penetrate. "So no one's upset with Clint for hiding his fake supervillain brother? He's robbed us of hours of fun. _Hours._ And Widow, how'd you even keep us from finding out? This seems like the thing Buzzfeed articles are made out of."

"Nah, it doesn't have that much to do with the 90s," Clint said.

"Well?" Tony insisted, eying Natasha.

She helped herself to a box of Cocoa Pebbles Barney had left out. "Pepper helped."

"Oh. That does explain it."


	4. The Shower

Barney had let the house fall into… not ruin, but at least at the crossroads between the owner becoming a cat lady or a hoarder. Clint spent the evening getting it sorted. Just kick-the-tires stuff. Vacuumed the floors, got the water heater lit, the vents changed in the AC. Little things Barney was too lazy to bother with. Steve pitched in for the same reason Clint had: took his mind off things. Clint thought they were working in companionable silence, Steve chopping the wood and him getting out of the way when it went flying, when Steve opened up.

"I saw Peggy."

Clint hadn't asked. This was why he and Natasha worked well together. But Clint supposed there were worse people than him to have a come-to-Jesus with Captain America.

"Mixed blessing," he said gently. "My parents… I can't even remember what their voices sounded like."

Steve shook his head. "I've never forgotten. What I remembered—what she made me remember—was what I'd hoped for. The war being over. Going home."

"The war is over. And I kinda thought you were home."

Another shake. "Naïve of me, I guess. Going home again, after war… like stepping into the same river twice. And Peggy, I don't even know if it would've worked out. She seems happy with the life she led. Maybe she wouldn't have been with me." Clint stepped out of the way as another swing of Steve's axe exploded the log he'd hit. He thought he caught a glimpse of one half speeding toward the next county. "Hit it wrong," Steve said apologetically.

Clint picked up the one that had landed nearby, tossing it into the pile. "No point dwelling on the past, Steve. That's what the witch wants you to do."

"You don't?"

"Not much past to dwell on." Clint set up another log. "Father who wasn't much good at it. Mother who wasn't much good at stopping him. You've met my brother." He stepped back, but Steve didn't swing. "Joining the military seemed easier than finding a circus to run away to. Never worried about coming home. Didn't have one to go back to."

"That's not your fault. It's mine."

Clint glanced at him. "Split the damn log, Cap."

"SHIELD was supposed to be my home and I ripped it apart. Why? Because it didn't measure up to the SSR?"

"Because it was full of HYDRA. You can't fix rotten meat."

"Maybe. That's what I did. Not sure it's _why_ I did it."

Clint reached out for the axe, which Steve let him take. "Steve, you're literally agonizing over taking out a spy agency that was a good percentage Nazi. And you worry you're not a good guy?" He swung. Split the log. "Next you're gonna tell me you felt sorry for socking Adolf in the jaw."

"Never actually did that."

"Shit, Mythbusters should get on that."

"Language."

"Really?"

"I'm owning it." Steve sat down, taking a bit of a break, just stacking up logs for Clint to hack at. Probably didn't need the break. Probably just thought Clint needed to hit something with an axe.

He was right.

"What about the Avengers?" Steve asked.

"I like it," Clint said. "It's brassy, it's sassy, it's a musical humdinger."

Steve ignored the humor; Clint reminded himself to leave the one-liners to Stark. "Kinda wonder if I'm pulling the team apart. Holding Tony's feet to the fire, now this thing with Bruce… I don't know how to hold us together. If I should."

"This a long-winded way of telling me you don't need a guy who shoots arrows to back up the God of Thunder?"

"No, you keep Nat from getting annoyed and killing us all. You're important."

"Oh, good." Another log bit the dust. Steve was able to catch the halves as they flew, which Clint hated that he was impressed by.

"Something Tony said to me earlier—that the reason we fight is to _end_ the fight and go home. And that's not what I'm doing. I'm fighting just to fight. Like I don't know any better or something."

"That isn't reason enough?"

Steve busied himself setting the firewood on his lap, ready to put them on the stack when they were done. "Guy wears a flag all over himself, he should be fighting for it. Maybe I don't know this country anymore. Waking up after all this time—I might as well have taken a trip to Norway, started fighting for him."

"Ask me, this country doesn't know _you_ anymore. That's the real problem. Helps, having you to remind people."

Steve smiled shyly. "Think we've got enough firewood."

"Yeah, we should stop while there's still a forest."

Steve got up, dumping and rearranging his armful of logs onto the stack. "All I'm saying is that maybe instead of whining that we don't have a home, we should be building a new one."

"The Avengers?"

"The people in the Avengers."

Clint shrugged. "Worked for Bruce, I guess."

"Worked for you, too."

Clint gave him a look. "Have you seen my apartment? It has less décor than yours does, and I've lived there five years."

"Home doesn't have to be a place, Clint. Like I said, I lost mine a long time ago. But if I had to do it all over again, the only thing I'd change would be telling her what she was to me a whole hell of a lot sooner."

"Language," Clint said.

* * *

Clothes grimy, flesh sweaty, skin still glowing with the sun's heat, Clint went inside to the refreshing coolness, the comparative darkness, making a B-line for the bathroom. Bruce was there, waiting. Looking more himself with his glasses on and his hair combed.

"I unclogged the downstairs toilet if you're interested," Clint said.

"Waiting on the shower. Natasha's in there. Just like she was two hours ago."

"So use the one outside," Clint said, and opened the door to the bathroom.

Bruce averted his gaze and made a half-hearted grab for Clint, which he thought better of, before Clint had stepped inside and shut the door behind him. This wasn't the his-and-her bathroom of the master bedroom, but a simple cubicle of the size you might find in a motel. Half a shower/bath enclosed in pebble glass, half toilet facing sink and mirror. The water rattled and buzzed inside the enclosure, the sliding door partially open, too wide not to look.

Natasha stood leaning against the mold-encrusted linoleum, both hands pressed into the tiles to hold her up as the shower spray beat down on her. Her body a slyph's, neatly muscled, but you could fool yourself she was soft. Scars were measured in plains of smoothness where the plastic surgeons had been to work, tiny mismatches in her skin tone and spotting them was like looking at paint samples. The difference between floral white and seashell white.

In the time he'd known her, she'd taken more scars, had more operations, but her skin had already been a patchwork when he'd met her. He knew the story of some of those not-scars, but there were plenty more that he didn't know about, didn't ask about, and she didn't offer.

"I fixed the water heater good, but not that good."

Her head turned, slightly. Eyes shooting through the gap in the door like she'd left it open on purpose, which he doubted. Teasing him, challenging him—seeing if he'd buy the cover. "Want me to make it better? Because I leave that kinda gruntwork to Stark."

Clint locked the door, wondering if she'd notice. "I need a wash."

"Want to join me?"

"I would, but I was going to take a piss too."

"Toilet's right there. Or can't you go with me watching?"

"Do you wanna watch?"

"I don't know what we're bantering about anymore."

"I really do need to pee."

Natasha closed the door the rest of the way. Clint sat on the toilet. He didn't need to go that bad.

The water rattled and buzzed, no longer hitting Natasha's back full-on, but slapping at her form as she twisted around, deflecting off her as she picked up washcloth and soap, pitter-patting at her feet as she forced herself into constant movement. Clint guessed the cliché would be her trying to scrub herself clean: _out damned spot._ But she was way past believing she could get free of her dirt.

"I was thinking about someone I lied to," Natasha said. "Someone I played. Everyone I meet, I turn myself into someone for them. This one just got to me."

"Before my time?" Clint asked.

"There's a before your time, old man?" Her smirk quickly faded. "The girl in the mirror. I fooled her pretty good."

"Nat, you're the most self-aware person I know."

"We're not exactly in the most mature company." The water came off with a jerk, dial squelching as it twisted, then Natasha stepped out. Clint handed her a towel. Her wet hair plastered across her face like blood from a head wound. She let it paint her cheeks, cross her eyes as she wiped down her body. "I wanted to think I could be a hero, so I… carried around a bunch of gadgets and made my costume glow in the dark and let Stark put me on cereal boxes. I actually believed I should be standing next to Captain America, beating up Nazis like we were on the cover of a comic book. I've just gotten better at fooling people. I can fool the whole world, and it won't change what I am."

"No, it won't. You're the girl that saved me when anyone else would've put me on the list right next to Loki. Is something else supposed to matter to me more than that?"

Natasha pulled the towel tight around herself. Let her hair stay in her eyes. Clint had to knot his hands around his belt to keep from straightening it. The way she had to keep a man from looking her in the eye…

"Going into the Red Room was the last time I was me. And the last choice I made was that I didn't want to be who I am now."

Clint winced. He'd heard Natasha talk about the Red Room before. She did it when she drank, which was rare, and when things were so bad that she let her mind wander to something worse, in her Russian poet way. That was rarer. And there was always a glibness there, a sarcastic cheerfulness—blaspheming against the Red Room by pretending she didn't bear its scars.

She never let its memory dig its claws in so deep as to admit the scars on every inch of her.

Clint retaliated, angry with _it,_ not her. "And I didn't want to be the guy who has to pop pills every six hours because he had a God in his head and he wants to remember as little of that as possible. But shit happens. You're you. Who else are you gonna be? Who else would you want to be?"

Natasha hung the towel up neatly. Clint didn't know what she wanted him to do. Look? Not look? Their usual clockwork suddenly had a broken gear. "Suzy Homemaker? White picket fences. Two point five kids."

"Don't do that to yourself."

He never had been able to do the cold, silent rage Nat did, look at sex slaves or broken children and just get harder, more silent. He thought of what'd been done to her—that little notation in her file about her reproductive organs that had been put in after her first physical and taken out as soon as Clint read it. It made him want to put ten or twenty arrows into something. The exploding kind.

Natasha actually wrung her hands, the old wounds she'd cemented over ripped open by the Maximoff girl, all the old hate spilling out. It had nowhere to go but herself. "You're saying I would never want that? What luck that I had the operation, because I could never possibly want—"

Clint took her hands by the wrists. She sunk her fingers into his forearms. Fuck it—he moved his hands up, brushing the hair out of her face. Her eyes were dark and unguarded: not weak, but resolved to something terrible. Something deserved. "Okay, you want to be someone else? I don't. I want you—like this."

A weak smile. A patronizing smile, as she turned away, fingers leaving his strong arms. "Ever since I've known you, Barton, you've never wanted me to be anything else."

He stayed right behind her, not making another move. He could see her wet hair part slightly where his breath hit it. "You were always good enough."

"I'm a monster." She said it with so little emotion, it could've been her horoscope.

"Bullshit."

Again she turned around, twisting at the hips like she was going to give him a right hook. "Do you know what I'm thinking now?"

"You know I don't."

"I'm thinking that since you so clearly want to, I should let you kiss me, and hold me, and tell me you love me. I'd like that. I'd really like that. But I'm _thinking_ that I shouldn't let anything happen, because you could die. Because you're vulnerable and Ultron's a killer. I could be alone again. So I should wait."

Clint shook his head. "I've got nothing but time."

"I don't want to be the person that thinks like that," she said simply, and then she was kissing him. Not the Red Room person. Not the Black Widow. Her.

Then she stepped back. Looked at his reaction. Took his hand and opened the door with her other arm.

"I think Bruce might still be—"

"Shh."

She dragged him out of the bathroom, down the hall to his bedroom—Barney at the end of it. He took a gander at Clint being led by the hand by a naked, wet Natasha Romanoff.

"Rock and roll," he said, giving Clint a black power salute.

Natasha gave him one of her Looks that could kill small animals, pulled Clint into the bedroom, and shut the door behind him. She kissed him again. Didn't check his reaction, felt it in the way his heart raced, his hands clung to her. The bed was five feet away and they didn't made it.

Clint was so glad he'd vacuumed.

* * *

After, it was Budapest all over again, although Clint didn't flatter himself to think he'd taken as much out of her as a grenade going off seven feet away. Natasha let him pick her up and carry her to the bed, pulling him down with her when he tried to set her down, some kind of judo thing. She was on top of him, kissing him, and Clint felt like a young man. But Nat took mercy on him, settling down after a moment, sucking herself down against his chest and curling up there like a panther sunning itself on a rock.

In the distance, Clint heard the shower running. Bruce. "It was my turn…"

"You would've just needed another one. And I kinda like you all sweaty."

"I should chop wood more often."

Natasha raised her head suddenly. "You were chopping wood?"

"Not a euphemism."

"With Steve?"

"Yeah. Still not a euphemism."

"Did he mention me?"

"No, we were just talking about homes and how he missed Peggy and… I guess a lot of things I'd been thinking about kinda crystalized. And you, uh, seemed open to the idea."

Natasha looked off into the distance. "That муда́к yenta'd me."

"What?"

Natasha shook her head. "Nothing. Forget it." She lowered herself back to his chest. "I suppose I should've thought about keeping this a secret before giving your brother a full frontal."

"You should probably think of a lot of things before giving my brother a full anything. And were you really going to have some kind of secret affair with me just so you wouldn't have to admit that Steve found you a date before you found him—"

Natasha leveled him with a look. "It was an option. And just until I found him love, which _shouldn't be that hard."_

"I know, right? The man's gorgeous."

Natasha looked him over. "You know…"

"You couldn't hook him and me up either."

"I was actually thinking of him and Tony. You do give yourself airs."

"Well, I did score with the hottest woman on the team."

"Who calls it scoring?" Natasha asked, slapping at his head.

Clint pushed her back as she continued to slap at him. "Abraham Lincoln, a close personal friend of mine—"

"Old! Old!"

He finally got her switched around, pinned down underneath him, pretty sure she let him win. He kissed her, just because he could. She let him, just because she could.

"You don't want this, do you?" Natasha asked, reaching up to rattle the headboard against the wall. "The house. Groceries. Mowing. Two point five kids and a fire in the fireplace. Because I can't do that."

"Me neither."

Natasha blew air through her teeth. "You could, though. You could get clear of everything. Snap your fingers and have a nice, normal life. With any woman smart enough to hang on to you."

"No. You, me, Steve—hell, Tony, Bruce, all of us. The tornado came through and ripped all our houses down. We never quite did rebuild. Just picked up what we could, piled in the car, and sped up to try and pass it, get other people out of the way."

"That doesn't mean they're going to be in the car forever. Tony's got one foot out the door. Bruce has Betty now. After Johannesburg, she's gonna ask him to come away with her. Put the Hulk to bed once and for all. Even Steve… all it takes is one person to get through that armor and…"

"That why you keep trying to set him up with someone? Can't count on him to stick around, so might as well kick him out the door on your own terms?"

"Maybe I just don't want him to be like us."

Clint closed his eyes. "So everyone else leaves. The Avengers are just us and that earthquake girl Fury's got on lockdown."

"Maybe Mockingbird. She's pretty good. Thor's sticking around…"

"You know, it's not that that I don't like Tony, but Rhodes… well… he has a better name."

"Falcon. Flies. Very cute."

"I was going to say that about Mockingbird, but thought it'd be inappropriate."

"It's totally inappropriate. She's off the team."

"Shucks."

"Fiddlesticks."

"Consarnit."

She kissed him. He let her. They were falling into a kind of lockstep. The old kind. The good kind. He valued it even more after almost losing it.

"Last chance to get out, Barton. Chasing tornadoes is a good way to get hit by one, you know."

"Yeah. But I know I can survive 'em. Just like my partner."


End file.
